Name: Phaidra “Phai” Colllins
Persona: Variant
Appearance: Age:19
Archetype:Gifted
Power set:(1)Self-Gravity Manipulation:Phai can manipulate her own gravitation in one of three ways at a time; reduced, increased, or directionally altered. When she alters her own gravitation it remains in that state for roughly 20 minutes, with an additional five minutes tacked onto the end where she slowly readjusts to normal gravity.
(1)Spheres of Altered Gravity: Phai can create a small sphere of about 5 cubic feet wherein gravity is altered in one of three ways; directionally altered, reduced, or increased. If she choses not to manipulate her own gravitational field she can create two spheres or create one sphere of about 10 cubic feet. Once created the spheres remain in place for about an hour, after which Phai cannot create another new sphere for about 30 minutes.
Power weaknesses:Conscious thought: Phai’s hold on gravity disappears when she is no longer fully conscious.
Flipping & Locking: When Phai is tired from overusing her powers if she loses focus- usually due to fear or mind altering substances, her gravitational powers do what she refers to as a flip and lock. When this occurs any Sphere she has created disappears and her own gravity field goes out of whack, flipping to the opposite of whatever state it was in before an increasing in magnitude. If she was reducing to gain buoyancy it increases and she gets stuck to the floor, if she was increasing to hold her ground she starts to float away. To make matters worse, when this happens the affect locks and she remains in the new gravitational state until she passes out.
Origin Story: Phai is the most recent in a long line of gravitational manipulation supers. Super
villains. Her dad went bad when her mom was killed in the crossfire of a hero vs. villain brawl, her grandmother went bad when funds got too tight and nobody wanted to hire her, and her great-grandfather was by all accounts just naturally a dick. Death, destruction, and hilarious failures is the legacy of her family. Great grandpa sucked a small town into a black hole and then forgot to turn it off before gloating over it to the superhero he was fighting and sucked himself into it as well; ending the destruction with his death. Grandma Amoret had stolen a valuable good from a city in each state and was going strong till she mixed up her marks, tried to rob a super genius, and was rocketed into outer space. Phai’s dad did what every gravity manipulator dreams of and managed to find a way to maintain his alterations when unconscious. From there he went onto terrorize the countryside, finding supers and trapping them in permanent inescapable spheres of altered gravity. For about a day. Then, overjoyed with his success, he got drunk, got attacked, flipped and locked. Now he’s locked up in a top notch prison in Mercury City stuck floating in a constant state of reduced gravity.
Honestly, Phai couldn’t be happier that her dad’s in jail. For one thing, it keeps him out of trouble and it means that she can see him regularly- During visitation hours once a month when she has the cash to catch a bus to Mercury. Plus she’s not on board with the whole villain thing, because to her it doesn’t make sense. Not only has it
never ended well, it just doesn’t feel good. For the sake of continuation of the species humans evolved to be altruistic towards one another, so doing good feels good. Which is what Phai tells people who want to know what the goth girl from a family of supers is doing trying to be a hero.
Phai’s dad got locked up when she was twelve, back when she hadn’t yet developed the family talent. She went to live with her non-powered aunt and uncle and her fourteen year old twin cousins Mark and Peter. Her Cousins developed their powers when they were seventeen and promptly ran away, with the full approval of their parents, to pursue super villainy. Phai developed hers the next year, when she was sixteen, on an unfortunately bad day. Full of stress and lacking any understanding of how her powers worked she flipped and locked into reduction on her first day
while she was outside. Coming from a long line of evil murderers and thieves doesn’t really give anyone the inclination to help you out and Phai was left to drift towards space for hours as she tried desperately, and unsuccessfully, to knock herself out before she got too high. Luckily for Phai, after she conked out due to lack of Oxegyn and started to plummet back to earth a B-list super who was trying to get the hang of flight came by and rescued her from the fall. She went by the super name Phantasma and Phai was absolutely enamored with her.
Phantasma agreed to take Phai on as sidekick, much to the disappointment of her Aunt and Uncle. The year she spent with Phantasma was the best of Phai’s life. Sure she wasn’t the
best sidekick, but she always did the right thing and she tried hard. Then she got distracted, made the wrong sphere when trying to stop a bullet and got Phantasma killed. What followed was an onerous couple of months of trials, which ended when her cousins, now going by the names Condense & Augment, showed up in town, and all charges and accusations of murder were mysteriously dropped. Her cousins expected her to give up the hero thing after that and join them, but she disagreed. That said, she could no more hurt her cousins, for moral reasons as well as the simple fact that they are far better at controlling their powers than her, than they could hurt her, their baby cousin/ adopted sister who they’d always looked out for. They agreed on a solution to the predicament, they split cities. Phai got Dodgeville and her Cousins got Mercury. Phai could visit Mercury to see her dad once a month, provided she didn’t go out of her way to try and do well while she was there, and her cousins could visit Dodgeville to see their parents once a month provided they didn’t go out of their way to commit crimes while they were there.
These days Phai is kind of a neighborhood hero, trying to do the best she can to help out locally despite the fact that no one on either side of the law wants anything to do with her. The Slight Heroics team is a dream come true for Phai, who is happy to have been recruited for a legitimate organization even if it was because of just how unlikely it is that she’ll be a successful hero.